Chapter 4 Rae
CHAPTER FOUR
RAE
The barge moves steadily over the sea, the telchin’s magic pushing it around the islets demarcating the sea arena. The wind blows back my hair, and I let it empty my head. I need to prepare for the games. I need all my focus to do this.
But Jai reaches for me. “Show me your hand.”
I jerk back. “No.”
He frowns. “I said, show me your hand.”
“Why should I?” I watch his face for signs. “Is it Jai I’m speaking to?”
He sighs. “Yeah, it’s me.” He’s standing so close beside me he’s exuding warmth and that scent of his, smoky and masculine. Hard to ignore. “What’s wrong?”
I shrug. What could be wrong, apart from his rejection? Phaethon’s nastiness? The king’s reveal and the mark he put on me? What else could be upsetting me today?
“There has only been one woman for me, and that’s fate. Fate can’t be undone.”
Yes, that stings the most. That he’s still in love with another.
“You went to the king,” he says.
“He wanted to see me. I obeyed. Not much of a choice. Where did you go last night?” I won’t admit even to myself that I had expected him to show up in my room after I left the king’s apartments. Not least, because I shouldn’t want him to. Shouldn’t need him to.
His dark eyes flash. “There are rumors that you spent the night with him. That he marked you.”
I stiffen. “And how is that any of your business?”
Jaw clenching, he grabs my hand and lifts it. Turns it over and glares at my wrist. “Hells. It’s true. You let him mark you? You accepted his mark?”
I grind my teeth. “I did.”
“Why? Fuck me, makhair, why?”
That word again… He sounds like Jai. He definitely looks like Jai. But how can I be sure? When the man in front of you is in fact two… how can you trust him?
I just shake my head.
“You don’t have faith in me.” His hands are balled into fists and tremors are going through him. In his anger, he radiates darkness, his shadows wrapping him in a black mantle. “What has he told you? Bad things about me, I suppose?”
“Was he right?”
“About me being his notorious sword? About killing people?” He bares his teeth, a flash of white, a flash of rather sharp canines that leave me unsettled.
“Is that why you let him mark you? Because he told you what I have done in his service? Did you seriously decide to become his wife because you realized I’m not nice? ”
I look down at the mark. The emblem of the royal House, the Pillar and the dragon.
Self-consciously, I touch it. Don’t know how I feel about it. The king has a betrothed already, Lady Selene. And he didn’t ask me before marking me.
But he’s the boy you loved.
He didn’t talk to me afterward. He sent me to my room with an escort—and no, it wasn’t Tru and Arkin, and the new guards ignored my questions.
“What else did he tell you?” Jai asks. “What were his other claims about me?”
“He said you can open gates, bring back the dead.” I swallow hard, my brother’s face filling my thoughts. “But you won’t.”
“Damn right, I won’t.”
I flinch.
“Bringing back the dead isn’t the answer, makhair.”
“How would you know that?”
“Because I’ve lost people too and the dead should stay dead.
” The barge edges closer to the isle marking the midpoint of the wall surrounding the arena.
“Listen to me. The fae changed by passing through the gates. To pass the gate is to die, to lose your shadow. The colors leach out of you, leaving you pale, from your skin to your eyes and hair. It twists you through animal forms, hence the ears and the sharp teeth. And it maddens you.”
“Wow.” I draw a sharp breath, frost filling my chest. “This conversation is over.”
“Why? You…” Something in his expression softens. “Don’t you see my truth? I told you my secrets. Entered the games for you. You don’t know…”
“What?”
“What it’s like to try and control Phaethon.”
“In the end, what does it matter?” I fight the hopelessness of it all. “Whether you control him or not. Whether you are to blame or not.”
“Doesn’t it?” His teeth grind. Light flickers in his eyes, then the dark returns.
“I loved him once,” I whisper. “Still do. Therefore, I can’t kill him. I have to protect him.”
The color drains out of his face. “What the fuck did you just say?”
The barge edges closer to the wall of the arena. We’re almost there.
“You heard me,” I mutter.
“You love the king?”
“What if I do?”
“What the hell, Rae… Why couldn’t you have waited, talked to me first?”
“About what?”
“The way I feel about you.”
“You barely know me! And you said you could only love once.”
“I haven’t lied to you, dammit. And now it’s too late.” He sounds exhausted. “The king put his mark on you. It’s done.”
“It’s just a betrothal mark.”
He gives a bitter, short laugh. “Is that what he told you?”
He isn’t making any sense. Then again, I’m not making any sense either. It shouldn’t matter. None of this should. And yet…
“He is the reason I am here,” I say.
A bitter chuckle escapes him. “And you were accusing me of being in cahoots with him.”
“Things have changed,” I say through compressed lips.
His shadows spin around him, coalescing into his armor, and the twin hilts of his nightgold swords jut over his shoulders. “That so?”
I lift my chin. “Got a problem with that?”
A jagged smirk lifts the mere edges of his mouth, devoid of mirth. “I sure do.”
“And why?”
“I’m killing myself to fight Phaethon and take down the king, and you want to protect him?”
“Nice to hear you’re killing yourself,” I hiss, “when all you’ve done so far is obey him and gather hapless humans to kill for you.”
“Godsdammit, Rae, that’s not true—”
“Isn’t it?”
His eyes flash. “No. And you’re my mate—”
“What did you just say?”
But he’s jerking back, doubling over with a groan. “No…”
“Jai—”
A growl leaves his lips as he straightens and the tell-tale gold flashes in his dark eyes, making me flinch.
His smirk sharpens until it’s a naked blade.
“Your opinion of us is certainly low, Little Human. Did you know we were a king once, a spirit roaming the higher worlds? That I had to lead my people through a gate, change my essence to save them?”
Oh no. I want to know what Jai was saying about mates, and now… I’m at a loss for words. I stare at him and it hurts. It hurts my heart that I’m speaking to Phaethon and not Jai now, in spite of everything.
“My people fought for a place in their new world, but lost the battle,” he goes on, his voice low.
He might as well be talking to himself. “We were too few. The inhabitants of that world had mighty dragons and the war turned to their advantage. They imprisoned us, chained us to the firmament, and used our bones whenever we fell to forge magical weapons and tools.”
“Phaethon—”
“We broke our chains and fought another battle, but the Reversal came upon us and changed everything once again. The earth turned into sky, the sky was filled with water, and I saw things.”
His words finally pierce the veil of sorrow shrouding me. “Saw things? What things?”
“I realized then that telchins aren’t the only ones who can see into the future by reading the threads of the worlds.”
I want to grab him and shake him, shake answers out of him, but there’s commotion around us. The barge has docked and moored, and the telchin is saying something. The guards are prodding the humans toward the side of the barge bumping against the dock.
“Jai…” he says. “This new name by which he goes nowadays. Well, Jai saw what I saw, and decided to cross.”
“Why? What did you see?”
But the guards start pushing us in earnest toward the prow, yelling at us to get a move on.
One of them grabs Jai, shoving him forward, causing him to curse. But it looks like the distraction helps him regain control, because he blinks and the gold fades from his eyes.
Long lashes lift. “Rae?”
I open my mouth, even if I have no clue what I should say, but my breath is knocked out of me when a spear slams into my back. I stumble forward. “What was Phaethon talking about? What did you see?”
“See? I don’t… recall.”
“Are you serious?”
“I don’t know what I was saying,” he says, walking beside me, almost at the prow now.
His frown is dark while his shadows peel back, leaving him dressed in his rumpled black clothes—the black tunic and pants from last night, a wide leather belt over his narrow hips and tall black boots.
“When Phaethon takes over, I’m not always present. ”
“Seriously?” I realize I’m staring at him, at his belt, his boots, the receding shadows, my mind stunned at this revelation and working on annoyed. “Let me remind you, then. Did you have visions? Did you cross to this world on purpose?”
His brows go up. After a moment, he shrugs those broad shoulders. “It’s possible. Right now, all I know is that I need to stop the king.”
Great. He wants to stop the king. And Phaethon wants to work with the king.
“Why wouldn’t we help the king? He has what we need.” Phaethon had said that.
He wants to help the king open the gates, and Jai is opposing that. He thinks opening the gates is a bad idea—just like I thought until yesterday. He won’t open them, if he has his way. Won’t bring back the dead, and won’t allow the fae to return to their home world.
And I don’t know how to feel about any of it. Opening a gate is a major event, but what if it could bring my family back? I want to kill the king and yet I love him, so where does that leave me?
Jai is frowning at me. “I was telling you something before he took over. What was I…?”
But a guard grabs my arm before I have a chance to speak and hauls me toward the plank. It’s thrown over the side of the boat and jutting out over the arena.
We’re done here. The telchin has nothing more to say, it seems. No need to check for our magic. We are the same people who walked this plank a few days ago, after all.
But are we, really? I wonder as I jump.